In database application development environments that do not offer search-specific assistance for application developers, an application developer who tries to implement search functionality can be forced to limit the search functionality to a single term and a single field. Furthermore, the application developer may be forced to write complicated database query code (e.g., SQL code) to implement the search functionality. Every time a field is added or removed, the SQL code dedicated to searching may need to change. Some application developers create one global index of every table in the database and use that index for searching, but keeping such index up-to-date is difficult. Moreover, the application developer typically has to implement a special user interface to display search results.